PublishPress Series is a plugin that we acquired last year. The Series plugin allows you to collect WordPress content together into a series. This is ideal for magazines, newspapers, short-story writers, teachers, comic artists, or anyone who writes multiple posts on the same topic. Over the last few months, we’ve been working to modernize the…
Block Club Chicago is a start-up with a very specific name and mission: they focus on block-level news in Chicago neighborhoods. They launched via a Kickstarter campaign and now get 70 percent of their annual revenue directly from readers through subscriptions and individual donations:
Fresnoland launches today in the San Joaquin Valley of California. This start-up is supported by Newspack (an Automattic project). Here’s the Fresnoland team’s description of their aims: “Fresnoland exists to make policy public – by, for, and with all residents of the central San Joaquin Valley. We’re not parachute journalists, trying to explain what’s going…
Happy 5th birthday to MLK50, a nonprofit newsroom in Memphis whose WordPress-based site serves low-income residents. Here’s how the MLK50 team describe what they do: “Our nonprofit news outlet in Memphis focuses on the intersection of poverty, power and policy. We examine the systems that make it hard for workers to make ends meet and…
We’re starting a major set of improvements to the PublishPress Authors plugin. The goal of these upgrades is to add some key new features: More customizable author pages. The ability to display all of your authors on one screen. Better support for the WordPress REST API. More design and layout options for profiles. Categories for…
The Current is a WordPress-based news startup out of Louisiana. They just broke a big story about corruption in St. Martin Parish outside of Lafayette. The story was reported by one of the startup’s founders who dug into the paperwork to find millions of dollars of illegally granted contracts. Click here to read the full…
One of the ideas behind PublishPress is that lot of innovation is happening with publishing, and that much of it happening on WordPress. I came across this launch of a new WordPress-based business newspaper in India: https://businessguardian.in. It turns out to be part of a entire WordPress-based media ecosystem owned by the ITV network, publishing…
Normally old newspapers try to start websites. This story goes in the opposite direction. The Stroud Times is a U.K.-based WordPress site started in 2020 and is now expanding to a physical version: “Readers are fed up with doom and gloom stories, we pride ourselves in being the beacon for positive news and engaging human interest…
The PublishPress Pro plugin allows you to send notifications about content changes via Slack. Recently, Slack has made some changes to how integrations worked. So we have had to update the Slack integration in PublishPress Pro. If you are using PublishPress Pro, you don’t have to update immediately. However, at some point, the old system…
Seth Rubenstein is the lead developer at the Pew Research Center and he posted a very interesting Twitter thread on their use of WordPress and Gutenberg: